Thanks for your eager participation! The Classics Circuit is on vacation for the next few weeks. Subscribe to the feed to make sure you don’t miss when we do plan the next tour.

In the mean time, I’ve started an experiment. To strengthen the community of those who read classics, I’ve started a “Web Ring” for classics readers. If the format doesn’t work, we’ll tweak it; for now, read more information about it here.

We are now halfway through the White Nights on the Neva: Russian Imperial Literature tour, and I’m sure enjoying all the posts about the classics Russians! I hope you keep following the tour for the next two weeks as well: there is much still to come!

One note: We’ve noticed that there have been a few “no shows’ in which people missed their scheduled day to post. We don’t want to miss your posts if you do post late, and we’d love to know ahead of time if you can’t make your scheduled day. Just send me an email at rebecca [at] rebeccareid [dot] com and I’ll reschedule you later in the tour. Thanks!

I thank all of you for your feedback. It looks like we’ll hold off on the Meiji-era Japanese tour until the fall so those who are tied up in August will still be able to participate.

In the meantime, however, we still have the White Nights on the Neva: Imperial Russian Literature tour beginning tomorrow! To try to simplify things, we will not be having weekly “This week in the tour” posts. I’ll make the main schedule for the Russian tour as a sticky post so if you you check this blog every day, you’ll be able to see the entire tour schedule and find the blogs that the tour is visiting. Also, see the button on the right side — that will also get you to the main schedule.

Beginning Monday, June 21, 2010, we’ll be celebrating White Nights on the Neva as Imperial Russian Literature goes on a virtual tour of the blogosphere. Check out these participating blogs where you’ll find reviews.

The button for this tour is a picture of St. Petersburg and the Neva River on a “white night.” It was taken by Incandenzafied of Flickr and used under a Creative Common License. The caption for this image on Flickr? “Yep, real pretty there.” Feel free to use the button to promote your participation in the blog tour. Please download it to your computer first.

Friday, July 16 Rebecca Reads Selections from the Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader
Friday, July 16 The Zen Leaf Dead Souls by Gogol
Friday, July 16 A Book LoverThe Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky

Please note: If you are participating in this tour and the information above is incorrect or you need to make a change to your tour day, please let us know by leaving a comment or emailing classicscircuit [at] googlegroups [dot] com. Someone from the Committee will update the schedule.

If you missed sign up and you would like to be added to the schedule at this late point, we still have a few free slots and we can fit you in. Just e-mail us at classicscircuit [at] googlegroups [dot] com.

On June 21, we will begin a new Classics Circuit, the White Nights on the Neva: Russian Imperial Literature. Depending on the number of people who sign up, it will run for three or four weeks, that is, until July 11 or July 17.

While on this information page we highlight some of the most well known novels and stories by these authors, any author or writing from the golden age of Russian literature (19th century) is suitable for the tour. This list is just to give you ideas and get you started if you are a newbie. Some of these works are quite long, but most authors also wrote short stories. Choose something you have time to read for the Circuit and enjoy! For more information and other authors you may want to consider, see Wikipedia.

Sign up is now closed.

If you missed sign up and would still like to participate in the tour, please send an email to the committee at classicscircuit@googlegroups.com and we will see if we can add you to the schedule.